Democratic Individualityhttps://democraticindividuality.com
In Democratic Individuality, I argued that at a high level of abstraction, modern conservatives, liberals and radicals believe that the best economic, social and political institutions foster each person’s individuality. Their differences are largely empirical or social theoretical. All clash with modern authoritarians. I will take up practical issues such as torture and the lineage of the neocons and link them to larger issues in how we conceive a decent regime, locally and internationally.Sun, 04 Nov 2018 05:15:46 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=5.0.3119944342Beautiful and true words from Oprah and Barack Obama with Stacey Abrams: Vote!https://democraticindividuality.com/2018/11/beautiful-and-true-words-from-oprah-and-barack-obama-with-stacey-abrams-vote.html
Sun, 04 Nov 2018 05:13:13 +0000http://democraticindividuality.com/?p=898
There is only one thing to do in the next hours: vote, vote, vote, vote. And get your friends and relatives to vote, call people about whether they have gotten everyone they know to vote, vote as if the democracy and your life depends it, because there is a really good chance it does. A police state with murders of the elderly at Kroger’s and at a synagogue in Pittsburgh or a move toward a decent regime in Georgia, in Congress – that is what is at stake.

“Black people will be free. I’ve been locked up (for disturbing the peace in Detroit) and I know you got to disturb the peace when you can’t get no peace. Jail is hell to be in. I’m going to see her free if there is any justice in our courts, not because I believe in communism, but because she’s a Black woman and she wants freedom for Black people.” – Aretha on Angela Davis, 1970

Hearing the voices of children separated from their parents at the US border calling for their mothers and fathers in secret detention centers makes any decent person, in the US and abroad, shudder. That the government uses secrecy even in grim public facilities, where at least the façade of the building is known to reporters, but also in nonpublic subcontracted warehouses for private military intelligence contractors like MVM to imprison children is both unsurprising – a sign of bureaucratically authorized crime – and appalling. Even some of the people who work in these centers – a nurse in Hastings, New York as well as someone who recorded the Propublica audio tape – take videos or make recordings with cell phones – at great personal risk and smuggle them out. Writing for Reveal and the Texas Tribune, reporter Aura Bogado was called by two witnesses because groups of children were being guided to two unknown, MVM “transition” warehouses/office buildings in Pheonix. There were no kitchens, few bathrooms; in one, children could only bathe in a sink.

The moral description of those responsible for these detention camps is shiveringly cruel or sadistic; the name for these practices is evil. On a whim of Steven Miller, Sessions and Trump – with near obliviousness to the rule of law – the US government does this harm on purpose, with malice aforethought, and also with casual incompetence. The want-to-be autocrat and his sycophants believe can do anything they want. They even flout judicial orders.

In response to Southern California Federal District Judge Dana Sabraw’s order to reunite children under 5 including some nursing babies, with their parents by July 10, the Health and Human Services Department initially reported that it couldn’t tell what happened to 16 out of 101 children under 5 years old – nearly 16% – and that they deported the parents of another 19 – 20% – and cannot even locate another 19 – 20% – released in the United States before hearings. The total missing was more than 56% – i.e. more than half of the families of children under 5. In a democracy with the rule of law, those responsible for kidnapping and abusing children be facing trial. Secretaries Alex Azar and Kirstjen Nielsen should have been sent to non-luxury jails for contempt of court by the day until there was information about and clear plans for the return of every child to her or his parents.

Instead, Secretary Azar then announced that the “Health and Human Services” Department would treat parents and their (violently by the US government) separated children as “unaccompanied” and subject them to a much longer review… Parents who often do not speak English or Spanish – many are Guatemalan Mayans, for example – and are often not allowed lawyers, have been browbeaten by detention guards and officials into and agreeing to be deported, sometimes back to likely death, as long as they could be reunited with their children. But the administration has now deported some hundreds without their children, and has, as Judge Sabraw angrily said, “lost track” of the parents.

These are parents who had believed in the United States enough to leave their murderous home for dangerous travel and often sexual abuse. Yet is there some other country which is now as cruel as the United States to these kidnapped children?
As of two weeks beyond the court order, only 57 of 102 children under 5 years old kidnapped from their parents had been reunited. Against Judge Sabraw’s injunction, 45 – 44% – were “declared ineligible” to be reunited. Judge Sabraw also ruled that the government must reunite all children seized – an additional, officially recognized 2551 children over 5 by July 26, As of today just under 1187 have so far been returned to parents or another “appropriate” family. But that figure may include some dumped in American foster homes (that is, kidnapped and resettled…). 917 – 36% – are deemed “not eligible,” including those whose parents had “agreed” to go so long as they could be reunited with their children and were deceived even in this.

These officials have legal “authority” – they can sadistically victimize children and families seeking asylum. The ACLU, represented particularly by Lee Gelernt, and many other attorneys, have fought heroically to get this much information on the chidren released. But reporting in the corporate press, though reporters are often horrified by Trump’s measures, is way too awe-struck about authority. About children, reporters dutifully listen to officials and report their views – really, half the parents are “criminals” or “smugglers or “agreed to be deported without their kids…”

One commentator on a CNN show said that what Secretary of State Nielsen had declared about asylum seekers – that they must present themselves at ports of entry – breaks the law. That is right. The rest of this article will report on 7 American laws which the implementers of this policy violate. But what legal and moral name is appropriate for administration officials and agents who are responsible for kidnapping large numbers of children and then “misplacing” them or settling them in foster homes?
The United Nations Convention against Genocide (1948) names the crime of genocide – a crime against humanity – as a pattern of action intended to destroy ‘a people in whole or in part.” The US government initially did not sign the Convention because segregation was genocidal toward black people (as was the government oppression of indigenous americans). But the US finally joined nearly every other country in the world by signing it under President Reagan. On February 19, 1986, it was finally ratified by Congress. Once the US ratified the convention, under Article 6, section 2 of the American constitution, that treaty became the highest law of the land. Since these are refugees, one may not initially see the broad pattern of American policy toward the peoples of Central America. But these are systemic efforts through military aid and coups in fostering oppression internally in, for example, Guatemala, Honduras, Salvador and Haiti, and harming the families who come to American borders for asylum.

Below I outline an indictment of major government officials under this Convention, the international Convention on Refugees (1951) and at least 7 American domestic laws. What I describe has been stressed by a statement below of 13,013 mental health professionals on trauma caused to children by forcible separation from their parents, by ACLU and New York lawsuits on behalf of the children and their families, by reporters like Aura Bogardo of Reveal and the Texas Tribune and Debbie Nathan at the Intercept, and by politicians like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

In a flash through Kafkaesque darkness, secrecy, casual incompetence and lunatic stupidity, the words of international and American domestic laws make clear just how obvious and monstrous these crimes are.

In light of the UN Convention against Genocide, Article 2, section (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; and section (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group, and in view of the Supremacy Clause, Article 6 section 2 of the US Constitution, which “establishes that federal laws made pursuant to it, and treaties made under its authority, constitute the supreme law of the land and override conflicting decisions by state legislatures or courts” and in view of the UN Declaration of Human Rights , specifying the basic rights of each person, regardless of nationality: article 16 section 3: “The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State” and article 25 section 2: “Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection” and taking account of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 11 Section 1 “States Parties shall take measures to combat the illicit transfer and non-return of children abroad,” and Article 12 section 1: States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child as well as 12 section 2: For this purpose, the child shall in particular be provided the opportunity to be heard in any judicial and administrative proceedings affecting the child, either directly, or through a representative or an appropriate body, in a manner consistent with the procedural rules of national law” (immigration judges hear cases of many parents or children at one time ; a 3 year old climbed on a table, unrepresented while a “judge” disposed of his case…), and in view of international customary law on command responsibility – that higher officials/officers are responsible for crimes committed by their troops against civilians and prisoners of war if they do not explicitly warn against the crimes (the Tokyo war crimes tribunal; Yamashita v. Styer, U.S. Supreme Court, 1946) and in view of the facts concerning the violent separation of children from their parents and transportation to secret detention centers, imposing trauma on the children – see the statement signed by 229 mental health organizations and 13,013 Mental Health Professionals below –
and in view of particular crimes at those centers like physical and sexual assault by guards, use of psychotropic drugs at the Shiloh Treatment Center in Manville, Texas, extreme neglect (children sometimes returned unbathed for two months and with lice) and the unwillingness of the Trump administration even to make available girls and young women to senators and representatives after two weeks delay, and in view of the administration having “lost track” of over half of an ever shifting but at least 3,000 stolen children, attempting to defer and then disobeying a court order by Judge Dana Sabraw of the Southern District of California to reunite these children with their families, the “officials” now have the cheek to suggest that the parents may be “human smugglers,” and in view of Secretary Alex Azar telling Governor Inslee of Washington that placing children including of “tender age” (under 12) in foster homes, with strangers and even in other countries counts as “family reunification,” and in view of Secretary Azar/ICE claiming to be able to reunite barely half of children with their families by and beyond court deadlines and now to have “lost track” of many parents, and in view of the CIA role in the coup against the elected Arbenz regime in Guatemala, the Obama-Clinton military aid to and support of the coup against the elected Zelaya regime in Honduras, the US arming of Guatemalan genocide against 200,000 Mayans and other ordinary people, and the fact that most people who seek asylum are fleeing (U.S.-backed) disintegration of law and order in those countries, the following are guilty of crimes against humanity under international and American domestic law, as well as violations of six further domestic laws, and should be prosecuted in American courts (or in international courts if American justice lapses):

a) Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions
b) Thomas Homan, former head of ICE, Ronald Vitiello, current director of ICE and all other officers of ICE who have not resigned or denounced the policies
c) Kirstjen Nielsen, secretary of Homeland Security
d)Trump
e) Steven Miller, advisor on crimes against children,
f) Alex Azar, Secretary of Health and Human Services
g) John Kelly, White House chief of staff and former Secretary of Homeland Security
h) Michael Pence
i) the entire executive board of MVM, Southwest Key, Geogroup, Corp Civic and other “private” detention centers (the Northern Virginia Juvenile Detention Commission is the first and so far only such facility to refuse to take kidnapped children)
j) all other American officials and senior executives of American corporations who have willingly collaborated or acquiesced in this program that is, who have not spoken out against it as American and United Airlines have
k) all individuals responsible for specific acts of violence toward children (drugging, for example, at the Shiloh Center).

On CNN July 7th, one mother was reunited after two months with her daughter. She said heartbreakingly: “Forgive me, my darling for leaving you alone.” Five year olds often do not understand when the American government illegally imprisons their mother and kidnaps the child. At the end of June, Secretary Azar bragged to Congress about being able ”with a few keystrokes in seconds” at the ORR [Office of Refugee Resettlement’s] portal ”to find every child” in one of his now myriad, deceitful tales. The separation – kidnapping – is already a crime and is amplified by failure to reunite a large fraction of the families despite court orders to do so.

But these officials have also committed 6 further crimes:

They have violated 8 U.S. Code § 1158:
“(a) Authority to apply for asylum
(1) In general
Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival and including an alien who is brought to the United States after having been interdicted in international or United States waters), irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum in accordance with this section or, where applicable, section 1225(b) of this title.”

Nothing in 8 U.S. Code § 1158 indicates the government may take custody of asylum seekers’ minor children, with or without force. Note also where the asylum seekers may apply — they are not limited to designated ports of entry and may apply any time within 1 year of arrival.

On June 17, Secretary Nielsen falsely tweeted:

“This misreporting by “Members, press and advocacy groups must stop. It is irresponsible and unproductive. As I have said many times before, if you are seeking asylum for your family, there is no reason to break the law and illegally cross between ports of entry.”

But it is not those “Members, press and advocacy groups” who are “irresponsible”; it is Secretary Nielsen’s own arrogant and baffling ignorance of the law which she directs balefully against children.

In addition, Border Patrol agents now – as a matter of policy – refuse entry to asylum seekers, making them wait out day after day in the sweltering Texas heat and permitting no legally required“credible fear”hearings. These acts violate Article 31 of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, Article 6 section 2 of the American constitution, and 8 U.S. Code § 1158.

As immigration attorney Lindsay Harris notes:
“In early 2017, for example, Human Rights First documented 125 cases of Border Patrol agents unlawfully turning back asylum seekers. Lately, border officers tell asylum seekers to “come back later,” turning away one family nine times. This violates our legal obligation under Article 31 of the international Refugee Convention and under our own Refugee Act of 1980 not to return an asylum seeker to a place where she faces a threat to her life or freedom.”

These acts add a new category to those listed above:
l) all border patrol and ICE agents who bar asylum seekers rather than facilitate a “credible fear” hearing

Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions has personally sought to stop all asylum seekers with a zero-legality policy.

As Harris explains:
“In June, Sessions reversed a grant of asylum for a Salvadoran woman fleeing domestic violence, single-handedly undoing two decades of progress for gender-based asylum claims. He also changed the standard for asylum to require not only that the government in a migrant’s home country is unwilling or unable to protect the asylum seeker from harm, but also that the government is actively condoning persecution by non-state actors — a higher bar for applicants to meet. Asylum claims should be adjudicated on a case-by-case basis, but Sessions’s order states that generally, those fleeing domestic violence or gang violence will not pass a credible-fear interview.”
Contra Sessions, however, women who are beaten and raped where local government refuses to enforce the law or collaborates with the rapists, are a category: patriarchal violence. Similarly, “cartel” violence – often where former military figures trained in the United States and cooperators with American intelligence lead the organizations – is also a category. In both categories, the abetting role of local government and American cooperation/power are visible. By bizarrely forcing asylum seekers to trace exact causal aetiologies when they have barely escaped being beaten and threatened with death, Sessions seeks to conceal violent, trans-administration American government interventions.

Once again, hundreds of asylum seekers have been deported without their children. These were often misled because they don’t speak English or for Mayans from Guatemala, Spanish and coerced (at the least) without lawyers present. Yet Sessions proclaims:

“We also have dirty immigration lawyers who are encouraging their otherwise unlawfully present clients to make false claims of asylum providing them with the magic words needed to trigger the credible fear process.”

2. Sessions projects his own sadism on these attorneys (as Martin Luther King says in the “Letter from the Birmingham City Jail,” in law, a racist feels no obligation to treat the children of an “other” in the same way as his or her own children)The violent separation of children from their parents is kidnapping (18 U.S. Code § 1201), including section (a)(3), an “act against the person is done within the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States as defined in section 46501 of title 49” for those children who are flown to other destinations in the U.S. out of their parents’ physical custody.

Spurred by protests by flight attendants, however, United Airlines and American Airlines have rightly published letters telling the Department of Homeland Security to stop using their services to move kidnapped children across the country.

3. The prison conditions in which many of the children are held – they have already been kidnapped… – are at best abusive and sometimes – the Shiloh Treatment Center – sadistic (on July 29, Judge Dolly Gee of the Central District of California ordered the removal of all children from this site because of the use of psychotropic drugs without parental approval).

Referring to a lawsuit to be filed by Attorney General of New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo names three further crimes:

4.“holding the children apart from their families is a violation of the constitutional rights of parents to care for, maintain custody of and communicate with their children. These parents are afforded the fundamental right to family integrity under the United States Constitution and under the New York State Constitution.”

5. “Detaining children is a violation of the terms of the 1997 Flores settlement agreement with the federal government, which set national standards regarding the detention, release and treatment of children in immigration detention. The settlement prioritizes the principle of family unity, requires juvenile immigrant detainees to be released within 20 days” On July 9, Judge Dolly Gee of the Central District of California pointedly reaffirmed this standard.

6.“we intend to invoke what is known as the ‘outrageous government conduct doctrine.’ In a 1973 case, United States v. Russell,the Supreme Court wrotethat it ‘may someday be presented with a situation in which the conduct of law enforcement agents is so outrageous that due process principles would absolutely bar the government from invoking judicial processes to obtain a conviction.’”

“Due process” – requiring habeas corpus, barring torture, and ensuring a day in court under well publicized laws is a cardinal feature of American law (see Amendment 14 to the constitution, article 1). For children and parents, the named officials have travestied this.

Trauma – also referred to as toxic stress – is today a widely agreed upon medical diagnosis, with evidence which has already come forth in the audio tape released by Pro Publica and the video recorded by a nurse from a detention center in New York – the weeping and silence. Trauma is the mental harm invoked in article 2b of the United Nations Convention against Genocide.

229 medical professional organizations and 13,013 mental health professionals have signed a statement on the often lifelong damage caused by child separation.

“Stop Border Separation of Children from Parents!

We would like you to remember what it feels like to be a child. To take a moment and remember how big and sometimes scary the world felt and how, if you were lucky, the adults in your life represented security and safety. We want you to remember what little say you had over what you did and what happened to you and that even though this was frustrating, some part of you trusted that your parents knew what was best for you. And that your physical and psychological survival depended on them…From decades of research and direct clinical experience, we know that the impact of disrupted attachment manifests not only in overwhelming fear and panic at the time of the separation, but that there is a strong likelihood that these children’s behavioral, psychological, interpersonal, and cognitive trajectories will also be affected. The National Child Traumatic Stress Network notes that children may develop post traumatic responses following separation from their parents and specifically lists immigration and parental deportation as situations of potentially traumatic separation. To pretend that separated children do not grow up with the shrapnel of this traumatic experience embedded in their minds is to disregard everything we know about child development, the brain, and trauma.

We find ourselves again upon a time where we will one day utter ‘how could we have let that happen?’ We cannot afford to forget that there is a history of separating children from their parents: during slave auctions; during the forced assimilation of American Indians; and during the Holocaust. The reverberations of these barbaric stains on our history are still felt today and future generations of these original victims will inherit the intergenerational transmission of these traumas. To try and argue that this policy of ripping children from their parents at the border is somehow different from the systematic traumatization of children during the times of slavery, forced assimilation, and the Holocaust is to disregard history. To somehow convince ourselves that this systematic traumatization of children has no bearing on the lives of these children and no impact on the legacy of our country is to be living in an alternate universe. And to not care about the impact these policies have on these children is to succumb to the worst potential of humanity.”

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions and Adolf Hitler both praise the racist 1924 US Immigration law which cut immigration from Italy by 90%, excluded Jews from Eastern Europe – turned back to Hitler – and also entirely barred Asians.

In a radio interview with Steven Bannon on Breitbart in October, 2015, Sessions asserted:

“In seven years we’ll have the highest percentage of Americans, non-native born, since the founding of the Republic. Some people think we’ve always had these numbers, and it’s not so, it’s very unusual, it’s a radical change. When the numbers reached about this high in 1924, the president and congress changed the policy, and it slowed down immigration significantly, we then assimilated through the 1965 and created really the solid middle class of America, with assimilated immigrants, and it was good for America. We passed a law that went far beyond what anybody realized in 1965, and we’re on a path to surge far past what the situation was in 1924.”

In Mein Kampf, Hitler belittled the Weimar Republic compared to the 1924 American exclusion law:

“At present, there exists one State which manifests at least some modest attempts that show a better appreciation of how things ought to be done in this matter. It is not, however, in our model German Republic but in the U.S.A. that efforts are made to conform at least partly to the counsels of common sense. By refusing immigrants to enter there if they are in a bad state of health, and by excluding certain races from the right to become naturalized as citizens, they have begun to introduce principles similar to those on which we wish to ground the People’s State.”

On the spirit of this law, here is Senator Ellison Durant Smith speech to Congress in 1924 to “Shut the Door!”:

“I think we now have sufficient population in our country for us to shut the door and to breed up a pure, unadulterated American citizenship. I recognize that there is a dangerous lack of distinction between people of a certain nationality and the breed of the dog. Who is an American? Is he an immigrant from Italy? Is he an immigrant from Germany? If you were to go abroad and some one were to meet you and say, ‘I met a typical American,’ what would flash into your mind as a typical American, the typical representative of that new Nation? Would it be the son of an Italian immigrant, the son of a German immigrant, the son of any of the breeds from the Orient, the son of the denizens of Africa? It is the breed of the dog in which I am interested. I would like for the Members of the Senate to read that book just recently published by Madison Grant, The Passing of a [sic – reading is not a strong point in this crowd] Great Race. Thank God we have in America perhaps the largest percentage of any country in the world of the pure, unadulterated Anglo-Saxon stock; certainly the greatest of any nation in the Nordic breed… let us shut the door and assimilate what we have, and let us breed pure American citizens.”

Because of abolitionism, the defeat of the slave-owners in the Civil War, and the civil rights movement, the United States has become – in spite of elite-sponsored racist movements – a welcoming place for people of many nationalities. It is the home of equal basic rights and their extension, with struggle from below, to women, blacks, latinos, indigenous Americans, gays, lesbians and transgender people. The crimes of the named officials are part of a concerted eugenic effort to drive large numbers of people out of the United States and harm millions of others.

White workers, like black and latin workers, have suffered the loss of health care under Trump. Money has been stolen from common good-sustaining programs – even food stamps for children – and funneled to the ultra-rich.

As Pastor Martin Niemoller underlined, no one escapes the harms of genocide.

“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Allow children to be brutalized before our eyes and the criminals will soon treat all this way. Fortunately, some ¾ of the voting population (and an even larger percentage when including the 50% who did not vote in the last election) is against this administration and many are acting on this. That resistance will be strengthened by bringing the rule of law, more pointedly, in the United States of America to the fore.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR.
Alan Gilbert is a philosopher who specialises democratic theory, international relations theory, social theory, history of political thought, ethics, philosophy of science and social science, slavery and the American Revolution, comparative revolutions, violence and non-violence, democracy and the arts, medieval Islam and Europe.
2

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Sunday, August 5th, 2018.

]]>891Dehumanization in Gaza and mass nonviolent resistance against ithttps://democraticindividuality.com/2018/05/dehumanization-in-gaza-and-mass-nonviolent-resistance-against-it.html
Wed, 16 May 2018 15:46:42 +0000http://democraticindividuality.com/?p=879 This piece from CNN below this morning – a “neutral” corporate cable station – makes clear, maybe for the first time in “mainstream” American media, why the ethnic cleansing and experimentation with weapons (“butterfly bullets,” drones) in Gaza repels anyone who looks at it. The nonviolent resistance of Palestinians is heroic. And even empty racist ideology – now represented in history by Ivanka’s face – as Judd Apatow put on twitter: “is this the beginning of a horror movie?” – cannot cover up the shocking resemblance of the Palestinian resistance – I speak as a Jew – to the Warsaw ghetto or as Avraham Burg = former speaker of the Knesset – and 7 other Israeli dissidents/leaders wrote, to the Sharpesville massacre.

That Yair Netanyahu rails against Soros in the same tones as Trump’s last advertisement of the campaign or Orban in Hungary or Putin highlights the alignment of such “war experiments” – testing weapons on Gazans and then exporting them – with police “training” to American cities like Ferguson, Missouri. We all need to stand up against this:

This is why Gazans won’t back down
By Brian K. Barber
Updated 7:20 PM ET, Tue May 15, 2018

Brian K. Barber, Ph.D. is a professor emeritus at the University of Tennessee, a senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies, and a fellow with the International Security Program at New America. Follow him on Twitter @briankbarber. The views expressed are his own.

(CNN)The main takeaway from the “Great March of Return Protest” — a 45-day event that began just after I left Gaza six weeks ago and Tuesday reached its most important moment — is that residents of Gaza will continue to protest regardless of the number of casualties they endure.

Brian K. Barber

Why? Intuitively, one would think Gazans would have caved long ago. An answer lies in two core features of Gazan individual and collective psychology, which my colleagues and I have studied empirically and as I have come to observe them personally in now over two decades of regular stays in Gaza: being marginalized and dehumanized.

Any individuals, organizations and governments who are seriously interested in making life better for Gazans or in resolving the hostilities between Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel, with its ripple effects throughout the region, must understand why Gazans keep fighting back.

They must first understand, however, that in many ways, there is nothing actually new about this spate of protests. It’s true that the US Embassy’s opening in Jerusalem has inflamed tensions, but this protest was not geared around that. Moreover, Palestinians have been protesting regularly for over 70 years now.

Further, the Israeli military often responds to any contest from Palestinians with overwhelming and disproportionate force, by a stated policy called the “Dahiya doctrine.” According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 55 Palestinians in Gaza were killed and over 2,000 were injured on Monday. That brought the total casualties over the six weeks of protest to 97 Gazans killed and over 12,000 injured. The first report of any Israeli casualty over the weeks was the minor wounding of one soldier on Monday.

US Embassy opening in Jerusalem is nail in coffin of peace process

US Embassy opening in Jerusalem is nail in coffin of peace process
Tuesday morning, The Washington Post published new figures of 61 killed and over 2,700 injured Monday. The Post cited Gaza Health Ministry figures to report a total death count of at least 110 Gazans.
Tuesday the protests culminated in acknowledgment of the Nakba (catastrophe), how Palestinians refer to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians at the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The casualty counts will likely rise.

Meanwhile, the Israeli government and military (along with the United States government) immediately scapegoated Hamas, which governs in Gaza and does not recognize Israel’s existence, as the terroristic instigator of such contests. This reaction obscures the lived reality of many Palestinians by effectively diverting domestic and international attention away from being able to understand their motives for protesting, which predate and go beyond the concerns of any one political faction. If people looked closely, they might see that the “Great March of Return” has long been a grassroots movement that Hamas (and other political factions) have come to support with the intent of keeping the protests as nonviolent as possible.

And yet Palestinians — Gazans, in this case — continue to resist, even when facing this lethal treatment on top of the dire water, electricity and medical conditions and travel restrictions they face.
From my earliest interviews in the late 1990s of first intifada youth — the adults present at the current Gaza protests, and the parents of the youth who are there — to last month in Gaza when a late teen told me that Gazans can handle the awful water, electricity and health situation, the theme of dehumanization has been deep-seated and constant. “The real effect of the occupation and siege is to make us feel ‘subhuman,'” he said.

To understand the sense of being dehumanized, a 2011 study I conducted with colleagues of several hundred middle-aged Gazans showed that, at the hands of Israeli forces, over the course of their lives: 80% have had their homes raided (which, according to the nearly 2,000 Palestinians my colleagues and I have interviewed over the years, typically occur in the early morning hours with squadrons of soldiers crashing down their doors and often very harshly treating family members); over 70% have witnessed someone close to them being humiliated; and over 60% have themselves been verbally abused. Our research, which shows similar findings for other Palestinian territories, also reveals that many have experienced all these events multiple times. (Given the numerous major points of conflict since 2011, the incidence of these would have only increased.) A quarter of men have been imprisoned at least once, with its incumbent severe treatment.
Behind this sense of dehumanization is a related, prevailing sense of being marginalized.
During the three days of my first stay in Gaza in 1995, I was captivated by one feature of Gazans’ “personality.” Beyond the stereotype-refuting humility and respectfulness, there was a deep sense of being ostracized. Even then, Gazans were aware of how they were viewed by most of the world, leading them — young and old, male and female — to repeatedly voice gratitude that I thought to come to their “little Gaza,” while simultaneously petitioning me repeatedly to consider returning someday.

In an hourlong discussion with a junior college classroom, I was asked the same pair of questions, verbatim, six times: “Do you like Gaza?” “Would you come again?” As if they could not be sated by my positive answers to both questions.

One high school boy pleaded that when I go home I tell Americans that “We are not all terrorists.”

The steady cascade of ruinous economic and political developments since then — whether sourced in actions and policy from Israel, Egypt or Palestinian interfactional divisions within Gaza — have only increased this sense of marginalization, with Gaza now completely set off from the West Bank and Jerusalem.

So, how to reconcile these deep-seated, deadening states of mind with the tenacity Gazans display to keep resisting?

A core Palestinian concept is sumud (steadfastness), or the determination to keep their land and build their country. It goes some distance in explaining Gazan’s persistence and long suffering, but not necessarily the intense, active resistance in the face of extreme risk, injury and death as is playing out in Gaza now.

It is better explained by what the forces that marginalize and dehumanize specifically target: identity and dignity. We’ve learned that all forms of adversity experienced by the dominated don’t have the same impact. Gazans and all Palestinians can handle much, obviously.

But it is the assault on their worthiness — as human beings — that inspires such defiance, as if there is a sacred boundary of humanity that cannot be crossed without instinctive rebellion.

That instinct will not be killed away.

This op-ed has been updated to reflect that the author’s research findings apply to multiple Palestinian territories, not only in Gaza.

***

Israelis compare the shooting of Palestinians to South Africa’s Sharpeville Massacre

We, Israelis who wish our country to be safe and just, are appalled and horrified by the massive killing of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza (Reports, 15 May). None of the demonstrators posed any direct danger to the state of Israel or to its citizens. The killing of over 50 demonstrators and the thousands more wounded are reminiscent of the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 in South Africa. The world acted then. We call upon decent members of the international community to act by demanding that those who commanded such shootings be investigated and tried.

The current leaders of the Israeli government are responsible for the criminal policy of shooting at unarmed demonstrators. The world must intervene to stop the ongoing killing.

Avraham Burg Former speaker of the Knesset and chairman of the Jewish Agency
Prof Nurit Peled Elhanan 2001 co-laureate of the Sakharov prize
Prof David Harel Vice-president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and recipient of the 2004 Israel Prize
Prof Yehoshua Kolodny Recipient of the 2010 Israel prize
Alex Levac Photographer and recipient of the 2005 Israel prize
Prof Judd Ne’eman Director and recipient of the 2009 Israel prize
Prof Zeev Sternhell Historian and recipient of the 2008 Israel prize
Prof David Shulman Recipient of the 2016 Israel prize
David Tartakover Artist and recipient of the 2002 Israel prize

]]>879The right to resthttps://democraticindividuality.com/2018/03/the-right-to-rest.html
Sat, 17 Mar 2018 19:00:03 +0000http://democraticindividuality.com/?p=873 This past Wednesday, I went to testify for the right to rest bill at Colorado State Legislature – this is a bill which would enable people to sleep in their cars without being rousted or ticketed or arrested by the police, to feed people in public (some churches still do this though it is outlawed), and to cover themselves with a coat or a sleeping bag in winter. It is the fourth time the bill has been proposed. It is so far voted down each time – the interests of storeowners playing a central role. But there is a continuing effort from below, on behalf of humanity, and it was inspiring to be there. The two sponsors – Joe Salazar, a candidate for State Attorney General this November, and Jovan Melton spoke with great power, and there were approximately 60 people, testifying for 3 minutes each, with the representatives then asking questions. I testified along with Michael Neil, a brilliant Ph.D. who has spina bifida – comes to this and many other public matters in a wheelchair – and from whom I learned that 40% of people without homes are also disabled, and Paul Kemp, another brilliant Ph.D. candidate at our school who lived in his car for the past 3 years to save money. A panel spoke from the Law School about their long report on Too High A Price: What Criminalizing Homelessness Costs Colorado. Mamie Parks, a black vet who was then homeless afterwards, and is now a fine second year law student, told them more. Professor Nantiya Ruan, one of the authors (there were 12), was also terrific.

And a panel of 3 women spoke from University of Colorado at Denver, where they reported 7-14% of students are homeless.

Here was my testimony:

***

I am a Distinguished University Professor – a university wide appointment for distinction in research – of democratic theory and practice at the University of Denver. I have also recently taught a course a year at Metro. An awful new phenomenon has emerged on campus. One of my best Ph.D. students, Paul Kemp, who will speak to you, lived in his car to avoid crushing student debt. At Metro in political science as of 5 years ago, the department secretary would quietly collect food to give to the roughly 10% of majors who slept in their cars. The greatest thing about being a teacher is to connect with the people who are our future. Is this the future that our students deserve?

I used to begin classes at Metro by saying I was happy to be speaking to the democracy. Often, many work two or three jobs, sublet an apartment, scrape by. Many find themselves, at times, needing to stay in cars. What does it say about us as a state or community, that we outlaw sleeping in your car?

It is hard to function if you have to shower at the gym, dress hastily, use a car mirror, emerge even more sleepy or unkempt than others. And that is without being hassled – waked up – and forced to move by the police. Is that something we want to mandate by a mistaken law?

To preserve storeowner’s business environments- a real concern – current law mistakenly forbids people to feed the hungry in public. Would Denver have arrested Jesus for the loaves and fishes?

Many people are on the streets only part of the year. Attempts to count people who are homeless miss people who are hiding out of the way.. Nationwide estimates are near a million people a year unhoused. And there are probably many more.

25% are women with small children. Many were abused. Out of stereotypes toward our fellow citizens, should you – and we, their fellow citizens – look away?

For these are – each one – citizens of the United States. One remains a citizen even if poor. And if you have a big medical bill , should your funds be exhausted? Should you be pushed out on the street?

If you are hit by a spouse or have a large debt to go to college, should you be silenced and pushed out on the street?

And should you then be arrested for sleeping in a car or covering yourself or your child on a winter night?

“There but for the grace of god go I”

Look in the faces of those who are speaking to you today. They are no different from the people who are our students or your constituents, and perhaps even our children, with some bad luck. Like Jesus and Gandhi, every spiritual tradition knows this. And no religion does well all the time. It takes the willingness to correct ourselves when we are mistaken…

But as Jews, too, sometimes remember: we should be kind to strangers, because we too were strangers in Egypt. The right to rest is a human right, a right of our fellow citizens. Joe Salazar and Jovan Melton have urged you passionately to vote for the right to rest. Please: stand up for your fellow citizens and pass this bill.

]]>873My Daily Beast article yesterday on Dugin, Eurasia and the UShttps://democraticindividuality.com/2018/02/my-daily-beast-article-yesterday-on-dugin-eurasia-and-the-us.html
Tue, 27 Feb 2018 18:12:25 +0000http://democraticindividuality.com/?p=869Daily Beast
MASTER PLAN
The Far-Right Book Every Russian General Reads
Alexander Dugin is a far-right Russian theorist who might be dismissed as a crackpot if his ideas for a fascist empire weren’t required reading for Russia’s military high command.

ALAN GILBERT
02.26.18 5:13 AM ET

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY LYNE LUCIEN/THE DAILY BEAST
In his native Russia, he is a prominent author and activist famous for promoting fascism at home and advocating for a vast Eurasian empire—a dark mirror of American “Globalism.”

Outside of Russia, very few people have heard of Alexander Dugin, the 56-year-old political philosopher and analyst whose views are so extreme that he has been denied entry into the United States—not too surprising, perhaps, since in this country he is worshipped by the likes of Richard Spencer, David Duke, and others on the violent far right.

Fascist or not, Dugin’s theories are influential, at least in Russia. In 1999, he became special adviser to then-Duma speaker Gennady Seleznev. More important, his seminal work, The Foundations of Geopolitics, in which he promotes the idea of a vast Eurasian empire that looks east, not west, is required reading at the General Staff Academy for every Russian military officer above the rank of colonel.

But in the West, Dugin’s book is dismissed as the work of a crank, when it is acknowledged at all. Only a 2004 article from John Dunlop of the Hoover Institution underlined this book’s influence. Dunlop rightly argues that the brand of fascism promoted by Dugin enabled “nationalist” strategists to reassert, with some precision, Russia’s enlarged boundaries. Yet Dunlop, too, dismisses Foundations as “insane and repellent,” as does a July 2016 article in Foreign Policy by Charles Clover. Arrogantly but also complacently, neither author mentions, let alone takes seriously, Russia’s subversion of U.S. democracy.

The most noteworthy thing about Dugin’s book, though, especially given that it roughly blueprints both Russia’s recent aggression toward its neighbors and its destabilization campaign in this country, is that until very recently The Foundations of Geopolitics was never translated into English, not even in a version sponsored by the CIA.

In 2017, a bollixed translation was published, but the translation was apparently done by a computer, without even a named author. This, too, is, unsurprising: During the Cold War, Marx and Lenin were translated by people commissioned by Russians, but few American scholars or intelligence people had any incentive to read them. In regard to intellectual work by “enemies,” ignorance is often bliss.

Foundations engages with obscure strains in 20th-century fascism, relying heavily, for example, on theorist Julius Evola, who advised Mussolini and the SS and promoted extreme misogyny as well as racism for use by the Russian elite. All sex for Evola is rape and a woman outside the home “a monkey.” He and Dugin both sneer that modern men—not to mention gays, lesbians, and transsexuals—are “feminized.” In the Evola-Dugin playbook, sexual and racist anxieties lie at the root of today’s Russian fascism. And with but slight qualification, one can see Rob Porter, Steve Bannon (an Evola fan), Roy Moore, and Donald Trump as decadent facsimiles.

Nevertheless, it seems foolish not to read Foundations carefully, but to do that we need a decent translation. To that end, I encouraged Grant Fellows, a student of Russian history and politics and my research assistant, to do a translation. His versions of important passages appears below.

Dugin’s words prefigure the testimony before Congress of the National Intelligence and CIA directors as recently as February 13: “We expect Russia to continue using propaganda, social media, false-flag personas, sympathetic spokespeople, and other means of influence to try to exacerbate social and political fissures in the United States,” National Intelligence Director Dan Coats told Congress. And going forward, CIA director Mike Pompeo added, “We have seen Russian activities and intentions to have an impact on the next election cycle.”

The chief aim of Foundations is to revive Evola’s fascist idea of traditionalism, which calls for the eradication of any trace of modern, polyethnic, egalitarian, feminist, and democratic cultures—“American globalism”—in favor of a vast, Eurasian, authoritarian empire of racially pure regimes in which women are confined to the home and breeding. That empire would unite regimes across Europe and extend to the United States and Latin America.

Beginning in the late 19th century, geopolitics has been the study—in the United States, Germany, and now Russia—of how to forge vast empires. In 1997, during an imperial low in 1997 for then collapsed Russia, Dugin first urged the creation of “Eurasian” influence. He thought of this largely as a matter of covert operations and information wars rather than, as in Crimea, naked Russian aggression. Urging murderous conquest of Donetsk, however, Dugin egged on the invaders to “kill, kill, and kill!” Such bloodthirstiness was enough to put Dugin temporarily out of favor even with Putin.

Dugin and Putin are not always on the same page. For instance, Putin has tried twice to join NATO to cooperate in Europe and has thus not always been set on fascist expansion. Nonetheless, in revenge for a disintegrated Russian sphere of influence, Dugin speaks for a wide elite audience, often including Putin, about breaking the power of “soulless,” “cosmopolitan” American “Globalism.”

Twenty years ago, Dugin wrote presciently about creating a Trump-like presidency: “At the global level, for the construction of a planetary New Empire the chief ‘scapegoat’ will namely be the USA—the undermining of whose power which (up to the complete destruction of its geopolitical constructs) will be realized systematically and uncompromisingly by the participants of the New Empire. The Eurasian Project presupposes in this its relationship of Eurasian expansion in South and Central America to remove its output from under the control of the North (here, the Hispanic factor could be used as a traditional alternative to the Anglo-Saxon) and also to provoke every kind of destabilization and separatism within the borders of the USA (it might be possible to lean on the political forces of the African-American racists). The ancient Roman formula of ‘Carthage must be destroyed,’ will become the absolute motto of the Eurasian Empire, because it itself will absorb the essence of all geopolitical planetary strategy awakening to its continental mission.” (Chapter 4 “The Re-division of the World,” p. 248)

“Dugin’s ‘Foundations’ prefigures the 2016 covert information or signals assault to destabilize the U.S. electoral process.”
Like many in Russia’s military elite, Dugin advocates a “White” Russian Orthodox empire against Chechen rebels and other Muslims. He also aims to sow division in the United States, offering as a depraved “White” racist, an ugly projection: “lean on the political forces of the African American racists,” by which he presumably means Black Lives Matter, which is in fact a nonviolent movement protesting police murders of innocents.

Stirring racist violence among his followers is the most profound form of “destabilization,” though Dugin’s advocacy of sowing “chaos and disruption” also applies to Trump’s threat in November 2016 to denounce a “rigged” election, as well as Trump’s obsequious embrace of Putin in Vietnam in November 2017, excoriating “hack leaders” of the CIA and FBI.

In Foundations, Dugin also reveres the preachments of obscure English geopolitician Halford Mackinder (1861-1947), who argued that Russia is the heartland of the world. Dugin adds that in Russia’s “relations from the Heartland position, it is clearly necessary to oppose actively the USA’s Atlanticist geopolitics at every level, in all regions of the Earth, striving to unleash maximum demoralization, deception, and in the final account, the defeat of the enemy.” (Chapter 5 “The West’s Threat,” pp. 366-67)

Last October’s news about Russian operations on Facebook reaching 126 million viewers and organizing rallies in Utah and Texas and employing sometimes unwitting, paid American agents during the 2016 presidential election are all illustrations of Dugin’s 1997 tactic.

In Foundations 20 years ago, Dugin spoke of a U.S. “national sovereignty” regime exiting NATO and—as John McCain and George W. Bush underlined last October 17—forfeiting its global power. Dugin avers: “While simultaneously supporting isolationist tendencies in American politics, those circles (often right-wing Republicans) believe the USA should confine itself to its own internal problems. The position Russia has been placed in is supremely favorable.” [p. 367]

Dugin’s Foundations prefigures the 2016 covert information or signals assault to destabilize the U.S. electoral process, a destabilization that, according to James Clapper, former head of National Intelligence, this destabilization succeeded more wildly than Dugin (or Putin) dreamed. “Every geopolitical level of the USA should be involved simultaneously,” Dugin writes, “similar to the anti-Eurasianism of the Atlanticists: ‘sponsoring’ the disintegration of the strategic bloc [Warsaw Pact], governmental unity [USSR], and furthering ethno-territorial problems under the guise of regionalism, which accomplished Russia’s progressive disintegration up to its complete destruction. The Heartland will force the Sea Power to pay in the same coin. This is basic symmetrical logic.” [p. 367]

First, Russian intelligence has long understood U.S. actions to destroy the Soviet Union. “Symmetrically,” Dugin argues, a “White” Russia aims to—and in 2016 succeeded in—shattering the American empire. In Dugin’s terms, Russia seeks to be the New Rome in a global “Eurasia.” Consider its work in Brexit in 2015, and the Trump election in which the administration has now sundered NATO.

In 1990 and 1997, under President Boris Yeltsin, Russia applied to join NATO but was rebuffed. At a 1997 NATO summit, President Bill Clinton promised Yeltsin falsely that NATO would not expand up to Russia’s borders. In 2001, Putin asked for entry into NATO, and President Medvedev in 2010 called for a Europe-wide collective security structure. If NATO had included Russia in the post-Cold War era, a functioning democracy might have survived.

Instead, the U.S. expanded NATO and engaged Russia even on its borders in Georgia and Ukraine (I leave aside the merits of independent, democratic movements in these societies.) Consider how John F. Kennedy responded to the USSR putting nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962. Why would one expect even a capitalist Russia, demeaningly excluded from Europe, to respond differently to a threat of a pro-NATO regime on its border?

Second, in 2014, the Russians recorded Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland on her “secure” phone bad-mouthing NATO and naming the new leader of the Ukraine. That Russian signals intelligence was effective against ordinary U.S. precautions, as Dugin foresaw, could have been gleaned by Hillary Clinton’s operatives (Nuland may have warned about this, to some extent). But Russia, they thought arrogantly and complacently, could never—never—reach the United States.

Were Russia not a “White” power, furthering violent attacks on black and Latin people and on the wellbeing of most ordinary Americans, as well as the ugly empire Dugin projected in 1997 in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the U.S., one might see its stand against American aggression as morally justified. Instead, as Dugin’s schooling of Russian officers underlines, Russia seeks to create a rival empire with even more horrific aims.

Third, the United States coined the term information warfare. Intelligence agencies under Obama used it first in 2012 for the “Stuxnet” virus that destroyed Iranian centrifuges at Natanz. Presciently, on February 1, 2012, former CIA head Michael Hayden warned: “This is the first attack of a major nature in which a cyberattack was used to effect physical destruction rather than just slow another computer or hack it to steal data. Somebody crossed the Rubicon.”

In 2014, Obama dissed Putin: “Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors—not out of strength but out of weakness.” That neither Obama nor Hillary Clinton grasped the possibility of information warfare being turned against the U.S.—even as Russia tested it under American eyes in the Ukraine in 2014—signals the sort of hubristic overconfidence that Thucydides spoke of regarding the decline of the first democratic imperialism in Athens in the 5th century BCE.

In Dugin’s words, the bizarrely “symmetrical” Russian operation in 2016 did to the American presidency what Nuland and Clinton had threatened against Putin.

At a strategic February 2016 “InfoForum” in Moscow, Andrey Krutskikh, a senior Kremlin adviser, menacingly announced that Russia was planning an information assault on the November election which would be equivalent to the first Soviet nuclear explosion: “You think we are living in 2016. No, we are living in 1948. And do you know why? Because in 1949, the Soviet Union had its first atomic bomb test. And if until that moment, the Soviet Union was trying to reach agreement with [President] Truman to ban nuclear weapons, and the Americans were not taking us seriously, in 1949 everything changed and they started talking to us on an equal footing.

“I’m warning you: We are at the verge of having ‘something’ in the information arena, which will allow us to talk to the Americans as equals.”

In November 2016, Dugin crowed aptly about Trump’s victory: “Trump’s ascent puts a decisive end to the unipolar world. Trump has directly rejected U.S. hegemony in both its mild form, which the Council on Foreign Relations insists on, and in its harsh form, as the neocons call for… This means that the unipolar world is liquidated not only under the pressure of other countries, but from within America itself. The peoples and states of the world can finally take a deep breath. The expansion of globalism has been stopped at its very center. The new multipolar world means that the U.S. will henceforth become one of several poles of world order, a powerful and important one, but not the only one, and more importantly one that has no claims to being exceptional.”

Ironically, given Trump’s soft-pedaling of Russian intervention, Putin has subordinated the United States. As Dugin boasts, Trump has already split NATO, the foremost Russian political objective. And, except for revelation of Michael Flynn’s being a paid foreign agent by Acting Attorney-General Sally Yates and pressure from below, the administration intended to do Russia other favors. Further, as former acting CIA director Michael Morell underlined on Christmas Day 2017, the Russians were even then spreading anti-immigrant lies on Facebook: “In a single week this month, Moscow has used these accounts to discredit the FBI after it was revealed that an agent had been demoted for sending anti-Donald Trump texts; to attack ABC News for an erroneous report involving President Trump and Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser; to critique the Obama administration for allegedly “green lighting” the communication between Flynn and then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak; and to warn about violence by immigrants after a jury acquitted an undocumented Mexicanaccused of murdering a San Francisco woman.’

Dugin’s account of geopolitics is also fundamentally dishonest. While Foundations extols Nazi advocates of Lebensraum in the East, he often “forgets” Hitler’s genocidal assault on Russia. And fascinatingly, Dugin‘s Foundations ignores the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who argued for an ever shifting westward “frontier” wiping out indigenous people. German imperialists, notably Hitler, saw the genocidal American “Wild West” as a model for the “Wild East” of Poland and Russia. Turner worked closely with Friedrich Ratzel, a German geopolitician, who coined the term “Lebensraum”: vast continental “living spaces” to be settled by those who murdered or enslaved indigenous inhabitants. Ratzel’s student Karl Haushofer taught the term to Hitler and agitated widely for conquest of the “Wild East” during the Nazi regime.

But Dugin bizarrely denies Haushofer’s role in invading Russia. Like the violent American Right, Dugin wants to recreate an imaginary Russia not as the defeater of Nazism in World War II—his book does not once name “the Great Patriotic War,” as Russians refer to the conflict—but as a now White Fascist Sun for orbiting racist autocrats.

In The Daily Beast last Dec. 11, I pointed out that initial exit polls used by the American State Department to test the fairness of elections abroad showed Hillary Clinton in the lead in four swing states and also revealed large discrepancies with machine-recorded results. This is, unless disproven by argument, profound evidence of the corruption of the 2016 American election.

In addition, led by Professor Alex Halderman’s testimony on June 23 of last year, 120 computer scientists warned Congress of the ease of manipulation of U.S. election machines which leave no paper trail or on which the paper trail can be turned off, as they were in Ohio in 2016. Easily hackable machines, by domestic enemies or foreign ones, must be replaced by paper ballots to secure upcoming American elections (currently, the U.S. ranks as having the 61st least safeguarded elections among democracies in a Harvard/University of Sydney study).

Yet in addition to using bots targeting likely Republican voters, the Russians tampered with voter registrations and perhaps even the machines to elect Trump. This systematic cyberwarfare is the most successful act of aggression inside the United States ever achieved by a foreign power. Though others executed the tactics, Alexander Dugin was the architect.

]]>857Tomorrow -Saturday at 2:45- the Cheyenne-Arapaho spiritual healing run will come to the University of Denverhttps://democraticindividuality.com/2017/11/853.html
Sat, 25 Nov 2017 06:10:54 +0000http://democraticindividuality.com/?p=853
I just got notice today of the Cheyenne-Arapaho healing run coming to Sturm Hall tomorrow – Saturday – at 2:45 – to raise their flags permanently at the University of Denver This is a great victory for the campaign to honor the Cheyennes and Arapahos and their descendants who have endured the Sand Creek Massacre and transgenerational trauma, driven to Wyoming and Oklahoma, with great resilience; it is also a tribute to the change in the University of Denver by the 17th Cheyenne-Arapahoe Spiritual Healing Run. This is the 4 day run from the National Park site about the Massacre near Eads over 4 days to the State Capitol. On its final day – Sunday – the run will go to Silas Soule’s grave in Riverside Cemetery – Soule fought Chivington’s orders – and commanded his men to hold their fire, enabling many to escape. On Sunday, the Run will then go to the plaque to Soule, a sheriff in Denver who was murdered after testifying about Chivington’s and Evans’ crimes to Congress in an ambush by Chivington’s men. So DU – against its founders – Chivington, Evans and Byers, publisher of the Rocky Mountain News – has entered pretty amazing company.

The Run then goes to the State Capitol where in 2014, Governor Hickenlooper, in the name of the four living (former and current) governors of Colorado, apologized to the descendants for the Massacre. Because of the commitment of Bob Coombe, the last chancellor, who read Gary Robert‘s magnificent 800 page thesis on the Massacre and told every incoming group of new students about it, 6 descendants of the Cheyennes and Arapahos came to meet with our committee every quarter. That was one of the many contrasts – along with the composition of our committee, which included half indigenous faculty – with the Northwestern Committee. Our report honored these discussions; Northwestern mentioned important facts, but then bizarrely tried to take the edge off them rhetorically. Provost Gregg Kvistad has also been profoundly involved as well, since she came, as Chancellor Rebecca Chopp. John Hickenlooper read our Report before he issued his apology.

The gathering is tomorrow at Sturm Hall (north side of Evans) at 2:45. I enclose a note of invitation from Billy Stratton, a wonderful indigenous scholar in the English department:

I am writing to let you know about some very recent developments regarding our ongoing work with Cheyenne and Arapaho communities, and to invite you to an historic event that I’ve been coordinating with tribal representatives. My apologizes for the short notice of this announcement, but we’ve only just finalized the event to take place this Saturday, Nov 25th.

I am pleased to announce that for the first time in DU’s history the Sand Creek Massacre Spiritual Healing Run will be making a stop on our campus on Saturday from 2:45 until 4:00. The Healing Run is an annual event organized by representatives from the N. Cheyenne, N. Arapaho, and S. Cheyenne and Arapaho Nations that has been held for the last 18 years to honor both the victims and survivors of the Sand Creek Massacre on November 29, 1864.

See the link for more information about the run and this year’s schedule:

Included in this year’s commemorative events will be a flag raising ceremony to be held in the Driscoll Student Union (North-Sturm
Hall side), in which the flags of the respective Cheyenne and Arapaho Nations will be presented for permanent placement on campus. This is done in recognition of their sovereign political status and to acknowledge their connections to the land on which the University of Denver and the city of Denver were founded.

We would greatly appreciate if you could make time attend this event (and share with others who might be interested) as representatives of the DU community and to support and welcome the healing runners.

My Best,
Billy

Dr. Billy J. Stratton
Associate Professor
Department of English
Special Advisor on Native American Partnerships and Programs
University of Denver
https://portfolio.du.edu/BillyJStratton
Dr. Billy J. Stratton – DU Portfolio
portfolio.du.edu
Billy J. Stratton, Associate Professor of English, affiliate Critical Theory, and Special Advisor to the Chancellor and Provost on Native American Partnerships and …

http://www.unmpress.com/books.php?ID=20000000005880

The University of New Mexico Press :: The Fictions of …
www.unmpress.com
Even as Stephen Graham Jones generates a dizzying range of brilliant fiction, his work remains strikingly absent from scholarly conversations about Native and western …

Amazon.com: Buried in Shades of Night: Contested Voices, Indian Captivity, and the Legacy of King Philip’s War (9780816530281): Billy J. Stratton, George E. Tinker …

In the spirit of healing and peace, I pay respect to the original Arapaho and Cheyenne owners – both past and present – of the land on which the University of Denver stands.

]]>853Rabbi Arik Ascherman at Korbel Thursday at 5https://democraticindividuality.com/2017/10/rabbi-arik-ascherman-at-korbel-thursday-at-5.html
Wed, 25 Oct 2017 06:59:36 +0000http://democraticindividuality.com/?p=840 Rabbi Arik Ascherman has joined with and defended Palestinians, particularly the hundreds of year old life-giving olive trees against depredations by the settlers, has been attacked last year by one with a knife, has been arrested (for being a human being) by the IDF, and is a man of great moral and spiritual courage will speak Thursday at 5 in the Forum at Korbel, and I will comment. Click the link and the poster will come up.

]]>840Time for all of us to kneel at the Anthemhttps://democraticindividuality.com/2017/09/time-for-all-of-us-to-kneel-at-the-anthem.html
Sun, 24 Sep 2017 15:42:16 +0000http://democraticindividuality.com/?p=837 I detest the term: “unAmerican.” But there is such a thing as genuine courage and patriotism. And the resentful orange toupee is now intent on making a Charlottesville of sports…

***

Bob Maxwell of the Oakland A’s, from a military family, a rookie catcher, took a knee last night. And the Jackson Jaguars (even the owner linking arms) stood up this morning in London for freedom of speech and decency by kneeling. It is time for all of us, particularly us white folks, as Heather Heyer, and many others have done, to join in…

Oakland Athletics catcher Bruce Maxwell catapulted himself into the national political discourse on national anthem protests, one intensified by President Trump’s comments over the weekend, as he knelt for the song preceding a game against the Texas Rangers. . . .

Maxwell, who said he plans to continue his protest, placed his hand on his hand on his heart and faced the flag during the anthem as he took a knee. Teammate Mark Canha placed a hand on his shoulder as he knelt.

“He’s very courageous,” A’s outfielder Khris Davis said. “I respect his decision, he’s just exercising his rights as an American.”

And for the happenings at an NFL game in London today, check out this video at http://bit.ly/2hsmHvp:

. . . quite a few players on both sidelines kneeled down as the Star Spangled Banner played. We can only assume we’ll see this across the league throughout the day.